What attracts coders to open source libraries?

If you ever contributed to open source projects, what was the reason?
I am contributing to my supervisor’s package which is really handy for biophysicists (quantum mechanics). It is basically tons of code in python, it has okayish internal design, coverage 39% and B+ codefactor. I wish we could get more attention from scientists in our field and attract people to contribute to our project.

learn about marketing? 🙂

I typically contribute bug fixes and small features that block my work. I only find the libraries out of other needs. If you want more people to contribute, I'd suggest writing a LinkedIn article on why the library is useful.

Finding bugs is one of the valuable types of contribution, but usually my motivation is to make errors and missing features known to public, because then developers can do my favorite software better.
Why they open source their libraries? Ask the opposite :) We are social animals, and I believe that will to make for new relationships is driving most of the open source forward. Also, why would anyone like to see their work to go in waste because they simply didn't share it? It is not a problem with commercial development though.

Use the thing, find deficiency in the course of using the thing, submit modification to the thing that makes it incrementally better.

If you want the cheap (but not cheap) way - offer swag for a PR around hacktoberfest, get featured on devswag.io, then watch the contributions roll in.

Lots of noise to sift through of course, but you're likely to get at least a few decent contributions from people who may well stick around.

The real question is: What do biophysicists use quantum mechanics for?

@Oktokolo for researching quantum mechanics that happens in biological organisms? i know of two cases: one is at least one kind of bird where it seems that it detects the magnetic field of the earth based on the spin of photons that get to its eyes, via some atoms in its eye that are entangled with atoma in its brain, or something like that.

other is a recent discovery that chlorophyl might be using quantum mechanics to convert light to energy, because otherwise it remains unexplained how it can be as highly effective in that conversion as it is.

@Oktokolo as mentioned @Midnight-shcode the second case our group is mainly focused on photosynthesis and processes around. Energy transfer during photosynthesis in certain types of bacteria can be effective up to 99 %, that’s a lot and we would like why is that. Perhaps we could be able to convert light in a similar manner in the future with similar efficiency.

Recent advances in 2D spectroscopy made it possible to discover that during photosynthesis there are long-lived coherences that cannot be explained by classical mechanics or thermodynamics. That means that you have to assume that electronic and vibrational states of the reacting complex are in entangled states. The theory of open quantum systems deals with this new challenge and aspires for the correct description of dynamics.

The main issue is that we cannot afford to simulate a sufficiently big system to get meaningful results. You can, of course, make the assumption that the bath is infinite with the additional condition and then derive an approximative equation of motion. This description still lacks to describe coherences correctly together with the overall dynamics of the system.

I would say it is somewhere between theoretical physics and biophysics, I will have to take subjects from both fields in the future at our faculty.

@Midnight-shcode
Wow, actual use of quantum entanglement in biological systems would be mind blowing.
If that assumption holds, i will reevaluate my aversion to creationism (would still have to decide between "we live in a simulation" and "god wanted it to be that way")...

But that there might be more relevance of quantum effects in chemical reactions like photosynthesis than currently is known to the public wouldn't be surprising enough to warrant adopting a relegion.

Thanks for the explanation.

Usefulness of the project, that fills a genuine void, as well as creating something I can showcase future employers; something I can’t do with a company’s private repo.

I used to contribute to an Ecommerce platform called Sylius, written in PHP and based on the Symfony framework.

Magneto was the go to choice, fully featured and stable, whereas Sylius at the time was still in beta. However Sylius was more modern, decoupled, easier to mould into what I wanted and I was already familiar with Symfony so I find myself contributing new features that I needed for my own project.

It just so happens one online store also needed them and so I worked closely with them on it. As a result I got a job there.

@Oktokolo i don't see how natural processes using natural laws (same as it always has been) is any argument for creationism (same as it never has been)

@Midnight-shcode
The thing is, that it seriously starts looking like game engine optimization. In game engines only things that are in view are rendered. In quantum physiscs, only state that is mesured is "rendered".

The creationism part was a joke of course.
But i would indeed prefer it to become more intuitive and easier to understand as knowledge grows.
The opposite seems to be the case.
Quantum mechanics must be real as a lot of tech is depending on it and just works fine. Also, something has to hold the atoms together.

But how would a bird keep a supply of quants in its eyes wich are entangled with quants in its brain. Each quant pair is good for only one mesurement - so there would have to be a source for entangled quant pairs and they would have to get distributed without interacting with their environment...
That just is absurdly unlikely - like tunneling a human through a wall (also theoretically possible but pretty unlikely to actually happen).